Become a Travel Hacker

Lesson 3 of 9

Getting Points & Miles Part 2

Become a Travel Hacker

Lesson 3 of 9

Getting Points & Miles Part 2

Lesson Info

Getting Points & Miles Part 2

I actually had a question about the social media emotions how do you tell the official ones from the fake ones? You'll see them, they'll come up on the actual airline site or and they'll be on the will actually be on the facebook page, so it would be like like the american airlines facebook page, you go to the american airlines facebook page and like it, you can go back and unlike it later, so when the next promotion comes up, you can like it again, but, um, there those are the kind of promotions that they are there actually run by the airline, so I haven't actually seen any once that I would think were fake, and I will say there's also another good way to follow promotions is if you are getting miles in a specific with specific carrier, so I want delta miles. If I follow the delta offers page on their site, they list the promotions all the time so you could go to the united page, look at their special offers and see where they're offering bonuses right now. United, I think, offers one...

with netflix. You can change your netflix account and sign up for american offers one with life block security system my family had account with life block security system, and I saw the bill come in the mail and I said I've never actually seen anyone use this. You guys get american miles for it? They were like no, so they called and they said they called up and they said, we want miles for this account and they just changed it. They came to their name from my stepmother's name my father's name and then they got they're miles for having their security system so there's, lots of things, probably that you already subscribed to that you could get miles for so two points to add to that a lot of these promotions, you could repeat a lot of these promotions. Well, the things that I mentioned like I do briefly alluded to the fidelity promotion. If you deposit your money fidelity, they will you provide a bonus of up to fifty thousand miles. They offer that promotion through three different airlines. I believe it's, american, united and delta and you can earn this promotion once per year. So basically, if you're able to meet the requirements you know, deposited and get the american miles or whatever you want to start with one year later from the data first deposit you can do it again and you're in the united miles in the following year, you could do it with delta, so a lot of these promotions can be repeated you're after europe and then a lot of the smaller ones just to mention briefly, we talked earlier about if you have a partner, a spouse or a friend or somebody you know, somebody else, they can also get that as well, so you can multiply that that way. Carrie, you online is asking to you recommend using one email just for all travel hacking activity or separating? Oh, that's a great question, I'm probably not the best at this, because I just use one email address for everything and, like everything comes into one thing. But, you know, maybe if you are signing up for a bunch of different newsletters, maybe it's helpful to, like, create a separate one or something, I don't know if that's that's the concern that they had, I'd actually say I use different e mail addresses for different things that airlines that I actually pursue and have have a status in or actively trying to get miles in those ones I send to my main email account and then other airlines that are kind of just one ofthe usually send those to my junk email account. And one of the other things is a lot of like the survey programs you can earn miles in, like six or seven different airlines, I think, on rewards or e miles, and in the log in is your e mail three and so I I log in that stephanie dot zito a female I can earn with my american account and then I use my wandering zito at yahoo my junk mail account and I get delta miles when I do that so I actually purposely used different miles as different loggins and sometimes you can get miles for a certain thing by creating a new account and a lot of times values a new account or some version of my like my gmail account without the dot because it still goes to your email I'll use that in order to create a new account in tow in order to like multiply I don't have a cat so I just multiply my own personality this might be a really basic question, but do you just pick certain? My biggest problem with miles is that I fly on something too for airlines because I'm always getting the cheapest ticket that I never get enough in anyone airlines so do you just pick like one or two airlines you always want to fly by and our there's ones that you would recommend? Yeah so uh quick follow up before I answer it how many miles a year do you fly in total? I don't even know how to answer that I don't really know how many trips like us uh probably I really like sex not a lot I like six or seven minutes so later in the day we're going to talk a lot about elite status about howto qualify for lea status and what that gets you and whether it's worth it or not and the answer is going to be different for different people you know based on what you're saying I think you're probably doing it right I think you're just just getting the cheapest possible ticket is probably best and I think you should focus the mileage strategy on earning a lot of miles that then you can use for awards on any airline you know on whatever you want and I think I think you should focus on your travel goal whatever that is and then let's get the miles for that in terms of actually flying I think you're doing the right thing I do focus ah lot of my like domestic travel on american airlines I have the highest status with them so I do like if I if I'm choosing a certain flight or something I'll usually have a preference for that but that's just for my domestic paid travel when it comes to like international travel hacking then I'm kind of mileage program agnostic you know like I have miles in a lot of different programs it's about what the best flight is in the best experiences I agree I actually travel quite a lot and I always don't have the opportunity to choose I do a lot of nonprofit work and usually I work for an organization and the cheapest ticket is the ticket that's purchase for me even sometimes I have to fly all the way to asia and get no miles for it because it's a really cheap ticket there's nothing more painful than flying for sixteen hours and no, you're not going to get a single mile for it but yeah, I know very hard however I think there are some things you can do by like knowing which alliances the airlines aaron being smart about that because if you're flying us airways and united currently they're both and our lions but if you have the united account and us airways account which you know you probably will because there's offers that are only for us airways are offers that are only freight united, but which one are you more strategically trying to pursue? So I personally I have both accounts and I have a lot of us airways miles, but because I use my chase credit card, which gives me united miles, which we'll talk about the next one I really try to focus whenever I fly star alliance put my miles into my united account, so if I'm flying any airline and has any link two star alliance that's my primary account that I'll focus those on so just being being more aware of how the different airlines are connected and where you should strategically put the miles chris, can you talk a little more about the gift card purchase strategy referred to in a way to multiply? Miles? Yeah, okay, I'll give you the short version, and I think we're going to focus a little bit more on next segment. Okay, then later in the day, we're gonna have a whole like story of a travel hacking road trip from stephanie, who drove across the country and trouble walking extravaganza, so it all involves gift cards, but the short version is at all office supply stores. In the united states, you can earn five times points with chase ink and bold cards. I believe those are the two all rights on, and so I will go to office, office depot to buy my starbucks card, my itunes card, my amazon card, anything that I want to use any other, any merchants that I would normally purchase from I would going by those gift cards and load those up in my account turn five times and times you can actually buy them online as well. I just tend to usually go to the store to do it, and we'll talk about vanilla reload cards as well, which is basically another way of buying money essentially, and those are gift cards, reloadable money, gift cards, we'll talk about that in exception, I think. Yeah and it's not just off the supply stores it's more about knowing where you can get the bonuses so if you have a credit card that's not the office supply credit card but one of the credit cards that gets a double both points or triple points at the supermarket you can go to safeway and buy gift cards as well. So there's gift cards everywhere and once you start looking for them it's amazing how many get cards there are and they even have lots of gift cards for lows it's really funny it's funny your statement because you'll see your card statement and you'll see like all your charges and it says like five x bonus points you know, for for whatever that category is so you can really kind of see each month like how you're doing so just to clarify you have a global audience here creative live and we'd like to be very clear with what are we discussing these these tips or weed talking just to the us viewers or does this apply to everyone I believe when it comes to give cards were mostly talking about north american viewers u s and canada okay, yeah I think this in general like dayton oh two or three said is it possible to implement travel hacking outside the u s since I'm from vietnam I want to apply the method not only for me but for family and friends as well right? So many things will be able to apply, but not everything. Cass might be one thing that we can apply in vietnam there's no lows in vietnam. Thanks to that, yes, there are we confined the links to these and send them out on our trouble hacking up trouble walking or clash creative live later. But there is a specific mileage forum for australia and there is a specific mileage forum for canada as well, so that would be helpful there. I will say I actually lived in cambodia for the last three years and there are lots of travel hacking opportunities around the world. They are a little bit more difficult to find. I was able to get a lot of points while I was living in asia dio have the benefit of being american so I can get could get credit cards while I was there. But again, vietnam airways is a sky team partner so you could in vietnam you could sign up for the delta program, be getting delta points through online promotion that are happening and be using those redemptions on being not airways again. One of the airlines I actually have the most miles on, which is kind of crazy is bangkok airways. They don't really fly anywhere, but I had a fly there a lot because that was the airline that was my choice yeah, I did a lot of intra asia redemptions is well that we'll talk about it I did I went to mongolia, I went from korea and I had another word take it getting me to korea but then I used delta skymiles on korean airlines to get to mongolia and it was a very cheap production yeah, you know it's a kind of thing where it doesn't have to cost you anything at all. There may be some cases where it's definitely worth it to spend some money to receive the miles you know, if you're getting an amount of miles that is so great you're gonna be able to do something with like we talked briefly about purchasing miles you know, purchasing fifty thousand miles for five hundred dollars, you know, I was happy to do that like I did that last week. No problem, you know, like when we talk about credit card annual fees, you know, some of these credit cards will provide a signing bonus of forty thousand points or more if it's an annual fee of seventy nine dollars personally, I'm not to pay that like personally find out a great deal because I'm going to use those forty points forty thousand points to go all of the world all over the world as we discussed, but if you really don't want to spend anything than you don't have to so this is ahh clarification question from c j what's the difference among all different miles are air miles the same thing as frequent flyer miles air miles and frequent flyer miles are the same thing yes so there's there's a distinction between miles and points we'll talk about hotel points later and there's also some different categories of miles so we'll talk about membership rewards points which is something specific to american express we'll talk about ultimate rewards points which is something specific to chase but generally speaking when we say frequent flier miles that means air miles jessica j says I don't understand the airline alliance thing how do you die and limited miles and then spend them with american knighted miles excuse me and then spend them with american and what does being a part of the star lines mean? Okay, so the first part you can't buy united miles and then fly american okay, so they really don't relate in that way if you have miles in united, then you can use them booking with united to book flights throughout the star alliance. So however many airlines twenty five airlines or something in the star alliance you can use them to book your trip through out there if you have american miles american is part of one world you can use those miles to book one world flights throughout the whole network, but you can't go outside the alliance wait a second question as well, actually, you kind of answered it because she was asking, what does being a part of the star alliance mean? What does it mean? Is it a global network, it's like there's, like three different umbrellas and it's, a global network of airlines that all partner with each other and there's a few outlier airlines that aren't a part of any alliance? But most major airlines are a part of one of the big alliances essentially a marketing agreement technically between the airlines, but I guess what it means practically for travelers is if if you're you know that airlines air code sharing a lot of their flights, if you're going overseas, say, if you're going to paris, maybe your connection to atlanta is on delta and then atlanta paris's eyes on air france, and then maybe if you went to vietnam, you know, be a non airways, so the airlines are cooperating and and if you have elite status in one with one airline, the other airlines in the alliance are supposed to recognize that as well. So if you have a lease status that allows you lounge access to one airline, you should be able to have lounge access, and all the other airlines as well should also allow you priority boarding and different things like that. We have so many people in the chat rooms participate and lots of questions they're probably coming through which means that there's even a crazy more amount of people out there online and mark says this seems too complicated for the normal traveller can we and the segment by talking about again how do you not get overwhelmed by that our who is this for how do we not get totally overwhelmed? I listened very question yes it's certainly true that some parts of it could be complicated some parts of it could be convoluted but I would say it doesn't have to be some parts of it are very very simple like we do want to simplify as much as possible here's how it would simplify it you know travel hacking will allow you to see the world earn miles in points there's lots of small ways to do it we talked on some small ways there's some bigger ways to do that in the next session we'll talk about credit cards how to earn forty thousand fifty thousand a hundred thousand points you know all at once it's really not that difficult when it comes to book the awards we have a whole segment on that coming up I guess you could lose yourself in it but you don't have to is what I would say you have something that I would just say if you want to earn three hundred thousand miles it is it might be a little bit complicated because you're going to have to do some work, but if you're happy just to figure out how to better place your miles so the flights that you're flying are eventually going to earn you enough miles that you can redeem it for a domestic economy award and then you actually can by learning how to redeem miles, you can actually get the award rather than think it's not available. I think it can be very simple for someone who just wants to fly in and miles and it can be really complicated if you want to get three hundred thousand miles bythe writes your experience right it's your experience and what you want to invest in it we touched, which touched on a few action points actually points of making sure you are registered with at least one miles program in all three alliances again, if you're not sure what to do if it sounds too complicated, just register with united dot com a dot com and delta dotcom get your free account it's free, easy, online on dh then we talked about a number of different things with the dining programs shopping programs sign up a few bonuses that are happening today that we mentioned s we want to send everybody away to take action and during the break would be great if you could earn five miles or more

Class Description

Want to jet off to Europe or Asia, or holiday in style without paying for it? Welcome to the world of travel hacking: the art of free or low-cost travel made possible through frequent flyer miles, round-the-world plane tickets, and other innovative money-saving strategies.

NYT bestselling author Chris Guillebeau has traveled to every single country in the world. During this course, Chris and a few special guests will show you how to earn hundreds of thousands of miles and points — before even getting on an airplane. You'll then learn how to put your new treasure chest to good use to go anywhere, anytime.

Your dream vacation is much cheaper — and can happen much sooner — than you think!

a Creativelive Student

Wow I thought I was a savvy travel sister already, but WOW you've taken me to the next levels. So here I go. Thanks a million Chris & Stephanie you ROCK. Big hugs.
I love love love Creative Live, THANK YOU SO MUCH for all you do. It really is the best thing in life to Learn & take Action, If I could only have one thing in my life :) it would be learning from all you Guys & Gals I am forever grateful. Cheers Doris

a Creativelive Student

Great class with lots of very specific things to do. Chris is wonderful and it's amazing to hear him talk about how he travels the world.
BUT it's really only worth watching if you're in the US.

Christine Yun

I wish I saw this course earlier! I learned so many tips on how to save money and discovered how to get perks from different credit cards. There's definitely long-term benefits to watching this class.
Also, this is a great class if you're thinking of opening a new credit card as it walks you the benefits of each one.